


Perfect Day for a Ballgame

by DiscordantWords



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Post-Colonization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 10:39:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/pseuds/DiscordantWords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."<br/>- Vin Scully, October 15, 1988</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect Day for a Ballgame

*

Leaves of corn rustled together in the gentle breeze. The sky above was brilliant blue, the sun strong and warm. The wind carried just the barest bite of fall. 

There were no pumpkins, no costumed children giggling in the streets, no apple cider or piles of leaves. There was just him, a lone FBI agent, sitting beneath the stalks, clutching a transistor radio and praying to a god he didn't believe in that the batteries wouldn't die and leave him entirely alone. 

A helicopter passed overhead, casting a shadow like a giant malformed bird, the thrum of the propellers drowning out the radio. His hair whipped in the sudden wind. The sound made him think of Scully, of a time when all of this seemed very far away and somehow preventable. 

At first, Scully was all he could think of. Now he tried very hard not to think of her. 

He dreamed of her, though. 

They were mundane, his dreams. Sometimes he drank coffee in his office, feet up on the desk while she sat across from him in a chair, eating a yogurt. Sometimes they sat in traffic or shared a cold pizza in a motel room. 

He supposed he should be thankful that he did not dream of the death and destruction he'd seen in the last eleven months, of seeing children ripped screaming from their parents, bodies torn open by the parasite within, troops turning on their citizens. 

But the dreams he had were his own special brand of horror, the kind that left him shaking and drained when he woke; tear tracks drying on his cheeks.

The frantic wind around him died down, the chopper moved on. Behind the controls were men; grim, unsmiling, with black swimmy eyes. Their thoughts were poison need pulsing in a brain that had once held human desires. 

They were not complex creatures. What they wanted boiled down to three words. Find. Catch. Kill. 

They'd get him eventually. 

But for now he was safe, relatively so, and he hunkered down in the corn with his jacket pulled around his shoulders, listened to the voice on the radio. 

"Samantha Smarrito here," she said. "Going out to anyone and everyone still human." 

Her voice had crept out from amid static after a month on the road, on a night where he huddled in an abandoned root cellar with the barrel of his service weapon in his mouth, biting down on the oily metal, eyes clenched shut, finger shaking on the trigger. 

She'd sounded uncertain. Lost. His eyes had opened, his shoulders relaxed. He'd dropped his gun in the dirt, spat. 

"I don't know if there's anyone... If anyone can hear me..." 

He'd started walking the next morning, weaving through tall grasses and farmland. Idle curiosity kept him putting one foot in front of the other, wanting simply to hear what she said next. Her voice became his beacon, guiding him in no particular direction, simply urging him to keep moving. 

He avoided pockets of survivors, slept alone, did not stop to help those in distress. His compassion had turned to ash the night he'd watched D.C. burn. 

The voice had grown stronger with every mile, every day. She'd stopped sounding so uncertain, so scared. He told himself it was bravery, but he feared she'd simply resigned herself to her fate, same as him. 

A heavy snowfall found him holed up for the rest of the winter in a Walmart, huddled under piles of blankets in the bedding department, eating cans of baked beans and beets. 

It was there that he'd started imagining that she was his sister, that the serendipity of their first names was more than just a coincidence, more than just his life taking him full circle. 

"For anyone listening out there," she'd said as the wind howled and whistled through the busted front window. "Hang on. Fight back. Survive." 

He'd pulled his hat lower on his head and the blankets up around his chin and shivered, face cold in spite of his thickening growth of facial hair. 

And he'd hung on. He'd survived. When one of those things had come sniffing around the store for fresh blood (its malevolent, hungry thoughts had torn him from a dream in which he endlessly rearranged newspaper clippings on a basement bulletin board on a Saturday, Scully on the speakerphone sounding exasperated but at least a little bit amused to be included in his weekend plans) he'd managed to bludgeon it to death with a jumbo can of collard greens. It had been weak and miserable from the cold, and had given up the ghost without too much of a fight.

Black blood had oozed across the dirty floor, seeking a host, but it had passed him by. He listened to it burble and grumble hungrily in his mind before setting it afire. He ate stale marshmallows from a bag while watching it burn, felt at peace with his macabre campfire. It left a bubbled black stain on the tile.

The next day, the air had carried a hint of spring. 

He'd left as soon as the ground thawed, once more chasing Samantha. Her voice grew stronger still. At night he lay on his back and stared at the stars, brilliant and innumerable without any light pollution.

He imagined himself blacking them out, extinguishing them one by one, until nothing remained. 

Sometimes he dreamed of standing on a grassy knoll with Scully, the two of them scanning the skies for life. His eyes had skimmed over the luminous stars, seeking lights, motion, bypassing what was there in search of what might be. He awoke from these dreams sick with regret, wishing he could scrub her face from his mind.

"It's a beautiful fall day," said the voice on the radio.

He looked up, blinked in the sun. The helicopter had gone. 

"A packed crowd at Turner Field," she said. "You can feel the excitement in the air." 

He cocked his head, confused, intrigued. He turned the volume up a little louder, as high as he dared. 

"Greg Maddux is warming up on the mound, and he looks to be in fine form tonight. The Yankees are going to have their work cut out for them." 

He laughed then, the sound tearing loose from his throat, startlingly loud and unfamiliar. His face ached and he realized his lips were trying to pull into an unfamiliar smile. 

"Chuck Knoblauch steps up to the plate." There was a slight tremble in her voice, but she held steady. 

The real 1999 World Series had been played on an interstellar scale, and humanity had lost. He didn't know for sure, but he doubted the Yankees and the Braves had ever even taken the field. 

"Swing and a miss on a really blistering fastball," Samantha said. "The count is 0 and 2. Jeter is ready on deck." 

Mulder shut his eyes, imagined the crowd, the snap of the ball, the smells of hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn. Just another game, to be distilled down to a box score in some historic record, perchance someday fated for a collision with melting ice cream. 

And just like that he was sobbing, his shoulders shaking, and he let her in, let himself think of her and all that he had lost. She had laughed with him in the rain, had argued with him, grown angry with him, shared tense silences with him. She'd saved his life, and he hers, and they sometimes woke each other up with phone calls just to hear the other's voice. He'd gone to the ends of the earth to bring her back but he hadn't even kissed her, not even once, and now looking back at those six years he didn't know how that could be. He'd had reasons, he was sure, but he couldn't remember what those might have been, he could only remember her face, and the way it had looked the last time he'd seen it, tired, drawn, full of concern for him, always for him. 

And he'd heard her thoughts, clear and firm amidst the swirling chaos in his head, in a pit of snakes who spoke truths with their brains but lied with their mouths she alone gave him the truth, and what he'd felt radiating off of her was a mixture of love and trust and fear, fear for his sanity, fear for his life and if he could have spoken to her in that moment he'd have said--

His shoulders shook and he thought of her face, her features, the hair he'd never had a chance to run his fingers through properly. He let himself miss her, for the first time since the terrible night he'd awakened under the night sky, Diana's hand on his shoulder and the smell of cigarette smoke in his nostrils.

"You're lucky," she'd said. "We got you out just in time." 

And he'd seen the chaos in the city, the bees, the mutations, the bombs detonated in a last ditch effort to stop the spread of the infection. But there was no stopping something that had been incubating for fifty years, he knew it then, knew it now. And he'd heard them-- heard them all at once, screaming out, echoing in his head. 

He'd heard them all, but he'd never heard Scully. Not once, never again. 

He hadn't always missed the mark, he'd once put his arms around her under the stars and swung a baseball bat, could say he'd spent at least a few moments with her just for the joy of it. He had that. At least he had that. 

"Two outs," Samantha said on the radio. "Paul O'Neill stepping up to the plate. The energy here in the stadium is absolutely electric." 

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath. He felt a little lighter, somehow. The sun beamed down on him from a cloudless sky.

"It's a perfect day for a ballgame," said the girl on the radio.

It was, he thought. 

*

End


End file.
